Allyship in STEM
- 3 days ago
- 16 min read
What does real allyship look like in a research lab, and how can leaders turn good intentions into meaningful action?
In this episode of The EDII Catalyst, Dr. Seán Barry (Professor & Chair of the Department of Chemistry, Carleton University) joins us to reflect on how mentorship, leadership, and everyday lab practices can shape more inclusive and collaborative research cultures.
Hosted by Eden Goodwin (PhD candidate, C2MCI HQP, and Barry Lab member), this episode explores practical approaches to allyship in academia, including policies that empowering HQP, the value of diverse perspectives in shaping research, and how leaders can elevate their lab members’ voices.
Transcript begins below video.
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Eden Goodwin: Today, we are very excited to have Dr. Seán Barry as our guest. Seán is my supervisor and is both a Full Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He works primarily on precursor compounds for atomic layer deposition and was originally trained in inorganic synthetic chemistry by Dr. Darrin Richeson at the University of Ottawa.
He spent three years working on CVD and ALD precursors in the Roy Gordon group over at Harvard University before he began working at Carleton in 2003. Dr. Barry was mainly working on guanidinates for Group 13 metals and then moved on to some other N,N'-chelates and N-heterocyclic carbenes on coinage and mid-transition metals. He founded a company known as Precision Molecular Design Corporation and is the director of the CU Nanofab.
Dr. Barry is generally recognized as a world expert in ALD and precursor design—which he has literally written the book about! He has many long standing collaborations with various industrial collaborators in the medical electronic sphere.
This week, we're going to be talking about allyship in STEM. If you've worked with Dr. Barry’s group, you might know that we've got a fairly diverse crowd of both grad students and postdocs from all different backgrounds. What policies and lab practices have you found to be useful in promoting equity within your group?
Dr. Seán Barry: When applying for funding (particularly NSERC, but most fundings now), there is an EDI section to complete. This section isn’t meant for you to say, ‘oh, I have my menagerie of EDI-looking people who look like this and that’—that's a terrible way to do it and it's a pretty dehumanizing way of thinking about EDI. Rather, this section focuses on what practices you have in place, what those practices mean, and what formal policies are in use.
A formal policy that we have in place is that we've got an EDI Manager in our lab; that's actually Eden! Their job is to make sure that everybody's up to date on their EDI training and bring EDI events to our attention. If there's something that has happened or is happening that is not equitable, it can go through Eden. If there's an EDI element that we could include, Eden can bring it up.
One policy that I've always wanted to implement but have never gotten around to is chairing group meetings. I chair group meetings and I'm pretty forceful: I go around the room and bug everybody about manuscripts and projects, then we do a literature presentation followed by a research presentation. And we always have a snack. That presentation schedule is made and I share it, but one thing I've been meaning to do is allow members of the group to chair the meeting.
I think this would be good for a couple of reasons: one, it's good for anybody who wants to get into academia or industrial science to know how to chair a meeting. Chairing a meeting isn't about getting what you want, it’s about making sure that everybody has the same voice and the same approach and the same freedoms in the meeting. Two, it takes attention away from the PI, who usually gets all the attention and glory anyways, and hands out it to our HQP [Highly Qualified Personnel].
The problem this is it's another burden of work, it's a scheduling issue, and we don't have a lot of free time in our lab. There's always a burning, burning research task that has to be done. I hope to implement this as a new policy sometime in the summer.
Our last EDI policy is a bit unusual in Canada but more common in Europe: members of my group can be the corresponding authors on papers. It is a lot of work; you assemble and write the majority of the manuscript, you handle the authorship list, you do the submission, you put up with the reviews, you cry in your pillow more often than you would if you were just an author—but, you get a star on your name.
I think that's good for any HQP of any stripe to take on. When I was younger, I really wanted corresponding author papers to demonstrate my work. Now I’ve got over one hundred papers, so it doesn't really matter; I'm always at the end, everybody knows it's my group, everybody assumes I did some work. Allowing HQP to take on something that I can more easily share is an equity practice in our lab.
If you've been in my group, you know that the general overarching practices are the ‘Roommate Rule’ and the ‘Get Along Shirt.’ The Roommate Rule is if everybody's doing just a little more work than they think they should, then all the work gets done and nobody feels like their work isn't getting done, or that expectations aren’t being met, or that there's work being left over, or that somebody is being lazy. Everyone gets along.
The Get Along Shirt is the idea that you can disagree—and that you should disagree sometimes, right? But that disagreement should be predicated on a healthy respect and hopefully a friendship or a relationship that isn't jeopardized by disagreeing.
Both of these are practices in our group, and I think those are really the fundamental building blocks to inclusion and equity.
Thank you, those are great! Most of these seem very focused on giving your HQP a chance to shine and take on additional tasks to further learn and develop their skills.
Our next question concerns students from marginalized backgrounds who sometimes experience microaggressions. How do you support these students when these microaggressions are coming from faculty, staffs, or their colleagues?
There is a systematic microaggression in most universities that when you sign up with a name, that name is forever your name at the university, regardless of whether or not you may have changed your name and/or undergone some kind of transition. The system is not built around the idea that people transition in life to different things.
Eden had started as an undergraduate at Carleton University with a different name. That name pops up every so often. I do know that it's called a dead name, but I had come up with the term ‘legacy name’ because I thought it was better. Eden's legacy name came up in the system, and I said, ‘I'm not white-knighting here. Do you want me to step in?’ Once you said, ‘I would like this taken care of,’ then my job became to take care of it. I take on the burden because I've got the bandwidth. I've got the authority. I've got the rhino armoured skin to go into the system and just bug people until that name gets changed.
In the system, we got Eden's name changed to their existing name. My job is to do the work; I've got the honour of being privileged so I can go in and do the work. But of course, I need to make sure you want the work done.
Next question: how has having a diverse team influenced both the culture and the research scope of your group?
I'm not sure that EDI as written in university policy would change the scope of research, but diversity definitely has. One of our HQP, Maram, came into our group from a different group and she was like, “I want to work on MOFs [Metal Organic Frameworks].” At the time, I was hiring for the C2MCI, so I said, “no, I need somebody to do C2MCI work. But I’ll tell you what: spend all your time on the C2MCI work and then if you have any extra time, you can work on MOFs.” About 2 months ago, we published a cover article paper in Chem-Materials on her MOF.
It's extra work for everybody; I need to find funding and a reason, I need to convince others, and I need to make room with all of the instruments and tools and space. Maram has to put in extra effort to work on her pet project as opposed to her paid work. But ultimately, everybody's doing a little bit of extra work there. And we wouldn’t have thought to do this without Maram who, being one of the diverse members of our lab, brought in a diversity of thought.
I'm also the Department Chair and I've been on a bunch of hiring committees. The first thing I ever learned on a hiring committee is our diversity issue does not exist in the applicant pool at all. It is million people from a million walks of life, from a million different countries, with a million different differences. They're everywhere. You get hundreds and hundreds of applications—some of which are garbage, some of which are great. Once you go through and filter out all the great ones, diversity is still there. The pool is diverse, but the selection process is not equitable; that is the problem. You can argue until you're blue in the face all you want about selection. You can say it’s just that certain people are being promoted over those people, but when you look at a diverse pool of applicants that are pre-vetted to be appropriate for the job with a narrow range of excellences now, and then you only choose the white men—that's the process, not the pool.
That was a big lesson the first time I saw that happen. The second time, Maria DeRosa had just become our dean and she said, ‘I want to hire a woman.’ The hiring committee was hesitant: ‘well, I don't know if we can just hire a woman.’ But the thing is, there's a hundred million women in the hiring pool. We're not going to have to break a rule to hire a woman. We're just going to hire for a woman. That's what equity is: remembering that we can hire outside of the old white male sphere and ensure others are brought forward.
It's getting better; the faculty is getting more diverse and people are bringing in ideas and thoughts and processes from other fields of chemistry, other institutions, other nations, other places in the world. That makes our culture of research better, but it also makes our culture better: our inherent teaching, research, camaraderie culture in the department becomes better, richer, more interesting.
Our next question: Not every student requires the same type of mentorship. What mentoring styles have you found success with and why?
I will say, I think a good rule is that you should see yourself reflected in your supervisor, and as a supervisor, you should never expect somebody to do something you aren't actively doing right now. You need to lead from the front and show people what needs to be done and they'll do it. Ask people to do things without a demonstration, they won't follow through. You want grad students at the seminars? Well, their supervisors have to be going to the seminars. That's what teaches them that going to the seminar is important.
C2MCI is a good example of this. I've always collaborated widely and I like it a lot; collaborating widely increases diversity of thought and increases what you can do on a project. It also gives you more examples of supervisors, right? One of our HQP was able to travel to Dubai and work with a supervisor that looks more like her than I do. Another of our HQP was able to spend time learning what life is like under a female supervisor that looks more like her and acts more like her and is from a part of the world she's more familiar with—I can't do that for her. I can be kind and nice, but I can’t show her what she would look like as a supervisor.
Your supervisor doesn't have to be a carbon copy of you, but it is beneficial for you to be able to look at leadership and see parts of yourself reflected and believe you are able to fill that role. If you're marginalized, why should you be the one making the change? It should not be on you to suffer the effects of marginalization and simultaneously make the extra effort for change. That's what allyship is: permission first, but I should also be supporting you by getting out front and being the vanguard.
I believe we've already touched on this a bit, but I'd like to circle back: how do you help elevate the voices of quieter or less confident students/HQP within your group and within the spaces you occupy?
Well, one thing shy or less vocal HQP learn in our lab is how to become less shy and more vocal. I’ve said this a million times, but research groups are a collection of weirdos of specific talents. Ours is a particularly weird collection of weirdos, but that's not that different. I want to help quieter people easily breathe in the same room I'm breathing and use the same oxygen that I so obviously use so much of. I do talk over people; that's a flaw I have.
Maram and Eden and I had a meeting, where Eden and I got in a big disagreement about the order and types of experiments, but it came out okay because Eden and I are the same level of aggressive. Maram was there, and she told me after the meeting that she had some thoughts, but she just couldn't say them in this meeting because Eden and I were at it too hard.
I think the fact that she felt comfortable coming back is an indication of good mentorship, but it's poor mentorship that she had to come back at all, right? We both could have made a little more room at the table for Maram. We know she's quieter than us. You want to realize that and be an ally in that way. I think that awareness is a very strong tool. It's definitely one that I have to work on a lot.
Another thing that I think is important about being an ally is that you have to realize that you need to earn a person's trust that you’ll be on their side of a joke before making any jokes. In my group, I'm joking around all the time and I always try to tune humor so that it is with you, not against you. You are included in the joke and never the butt of the joke. I think I'm good at inclusive humor; my humor is not for everybody, but I think the inclusive aspect of it is okay.
Audience Member: Is there a question that you wish Eden had asked you during this episode?
That's always the last question on my final exams: ‘Is there something that you studied and prepared for that I didn't ask about?’ I think I should have brought up that one thing I do in the group is that when we talk about bringing a new grad student, we talk about them in group meeting. If they're from Carleton, most of the group will already know them somehow. When the prospective member visits, I get them to visit the group and talk to people. When they apply, I get them to write emails to the group and ask what group life is like.
I do this for two reasons: one, I want to make sure that the group clicks with them. And two: diversity helps diversity. If I've got a bunch of people on the lookout for potential grad students, I'm going to end up with a more diverse group of grad students, which means we're going to continue to have a lot of different, interesting contributions to what we do.
Audience Member: How different is the landscape of people from when you started in academia compared to now?
That's a good question. I think most people my age can back this up; I got my PhD in ’96 and I started in ’92. Right about then, it was male-centric, but around 25~35% of PhD candidates were women. I would say that from a male to female ratio point of view, that ratio is about the same, perhaps a little worse. From a diversity of faces point of view: we had a lot of candidates from Asia and a lot of people from India due to immigration policies in Canada,sSo we had a bit of diversity that way. From a Queer point of view: it was really the era of ‘don't ask, don't tell.’ You didn't know, so there was effectively zero representation.
I think the real difference is that the competence and versatility of HQP is much greater now than it used to be. Back then, you didn't have to be writing a paper every year. Undergraduates were barely on manuscripts or papers; I mean, the occasional one was, but now it’s pretty standard. I think that's good if you're getting into academia, but I think that's a lot of pressure. I think that's a bigger difference I noticed than the diversity difference.
Audience Member: Do either of you have tips for others in leadership positions who want to show their support for lab members without doing so in a performative fashion?
Eden Goodwin: As a member of a marginalized group, one of the things that I have found most useful is sharing and finding moments of similarity in our experiences. I am still white and still benefit from many systems of oppression, so while I may not be marginalized in the ways that other members of the group are, I can still have moments of solidarity and similarity with my lab members. I can sit with them in their feelings with that. I think humanizing yourself is really useful, but so is letting a human connection happen. That has been really, really helpful for me in terms of a non-performative support.
I think from my point of view, non-performative support is adopting problems and giving up glory. If you're going to benefit from something, ask yourself if somebody else in your group can benefit from it and whether they would be the only one that benefits from it. That's generosity—that’s equity.
By ‘adopt problems,’ I mean that the leader of the group will have a lot of privilege, even if that leader has some axis on which they are marginalized. They will have a lot more opportunity to cause problems in search of solutions because that is their job. So: adopt problems and give up glory. I think that's a really good way to do that, because that is definitely not performative and it's hard to want to do that. When it's hard to do, it's worth doing.
Audience Member: How do you usually ensure that students are well supported throughout projects with industry partners? How do you balance your support with the industrial demands that come along with it?
Industrial partners are also EDI partners; they also benefit from and like to promote EDI, but they will have demands and demands are a good learning experience. This is what it's like to get funding, this is what it's like to ensure the projects are beneficial to everyone and promoting what they need. I don't love asking people to work on the weekend, but I asked Eden or Maram to work last weekend because we're just in a position where we need the work done. I emphasized that after this, there should be time off in lieu. But the industrial demands are there, right? There's no sense shielding Eden or Maram from the demands of this project because it's unfair for them to think that there are no demands, and then they go out in the wider world and find that out for themselves.
How do I balance this with my support? Well, I'll tell you: with industrial partners, I balance it financially. I pay a pretty solid salary for Postdoctoral Researchers and have for years. It's much higher than many of my colleagues, and the reason for that is because an industrial partner will pay. Your worth is a lot of things—your dignity, for example—but your worth is also your salary. One of the main ways I can advocate for my team is I can get you more highly paid.
Whenever we're talking about how to support people and I’m asked, ‘how do we support our grad students?’ I always say, ‘give them more money.’ It's the easiest and most obvious support.
Giving someone a higher salary—especially when they're on a lower income scale—gives them the agency to decide what accessibility tools can have, whether that's something as basic as a car or additional support with something like cooking.
It could help provide childcare, or support for parents, or… none of our business! Everybody needs money, obviously. It doesn't matter what they want to spend their money on, but more money is better for everybody.
Audience Member: I experienced racism when I was very young. I experience quite a bit less now, but how often do you think that would have been the case back in the day? Was it very common to hear about situations like that? How frequently were you hearing about overt systems of racism?
I think when you're outside of the university system, racism is more prevalent. We forget how privileged we are—even the underprivileged among us are privileged in the university. We've been selected to be here and we're here because we're good at this. We're in a pretty open-minded part of the world for the most part. I grew up in farm country and it was extremely racist. They were racist to all except for the two men from Jamaica that worked on the tobacco farm and were there the entire year. They would say, ‘those two guys don't count because they're part of our community.’ I imagine that mindset is still prevalent today.
Back in the day, overt racism was much more prevalent. When leadership demonstrates that it’s okay to be racist to a certain degree, you see more of it. I would say that the late ‘90s was less racist than it is now, because leadership in the world was less obviously racist than it is now. We're now seeing an uptick in racism and classism because it's being demonstrated at the highest levels of leadership.
Do I think it was common to hear about racism back then? I think in grade school and high school, the answer is yes. But I got to university in ’87 and the message was, ‘we are now done with that. Racism has no place here.’ I think it has everything to do with where you are.
These things change over time, too. Today, if you watch sitcoms from the ‘80s, it is shocking what people would say: racist comments, about queerness, about body image, just everything across the board, and I think that's because leadership at the time was far more vocal.
This final question is something we ask of every single guest: what is your favourite molecule or element and why?
My favorite molecule? That's a tough one. My favourite element, though: I've been saying lately that it’s gold. In 2016, it was the year of the periodic table and every inorganic chemist in the face of the planet was getting invited to CBC to give their spiel and pull an element out of a hat. An HQP in the Crudden lab, Hriday Bhattacharjee, and I figured out Alan Neal’s numerical method for picking the numbers—he would take your number and then perform some math—and we conspired to make him talk about gold. Alan Neal was super unhappy about it and after that, he just pulled your number out of a hat. So, gold is one of my favourites.
Thank you very much to Dr. Seán Barry for joining us today, and thank you to our live audience for joining us. We hope to see you all back again soon. If you have any follow up questions for either me or Seán, always free to reach out to us; we're easy to find on the web.
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The EDII Catalyst is a podcast series hosted by the Carbon to Metal Coating Institute (C2MCI) at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
In this series, we explore topics of equity, diversity, inclusion and Indigeneity in STEM featuring guest speakers from diverse backgrounds and perspectives discussing their lived experiences. We provide helpful resources and tips on how to create more inclusive and equitable environments and hope to inspire you to become a “catalyst” for change in your own communities and workplaces!
The EDII Catalyst is made possible by the support of the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (#NFRFT-2020-00573).
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